Financial institutions typically interact with parties to transactions, such as individuals, partnerships, companies, and corporations, by providing points of presentment at locations that are, convenient to the parties to the transactions. Points of presentment include, for example, front counters of bank branches, cash vaults, merchant back offices, and automated teller machines (ATMs) providing deposit automation. Parties to transactions present physical items embodying a transaction at these points of presentment, and these items typically include checks, cash, withdrawal slips, deposit slips, loan payment slips, and/or remittance slips. Images of these items are taken at the point of presentment to assist in the processing of the transaction.
While tellers often assist parties to transactions at some points of presentment, these tellers are typically required to spend excessive amounts of time and attention to data entry and transaction balancing. Furthermore, the tellers typically have no way of ensuring that all items of a transaction are valid. In addition, points of presentment affording no teller assistance rely entirely on the party to the transaction to ensure that the transaction is balanced. Thus, the teller's focus is on the transaction and not the customer.
Often financial institution branches will initiate a transaction at the point of presentment, then re-initiate assembly and processing of the transaction and images of the transaction, long after the party to the transaction has departed the point of presentment. As a result, unbalanced and/or invalid transactions, and image mismatches are discovered late, without affording the party to the transaction or the teller at the point of presentment an opportunity to correct or otherwise balance the transaction.
For financial institutions to be capable of truncating items at the point of presentment, and to comply with newly published standards for the exchange of image based transactions, (ANSI DSTU X9.37 2003), it is necessary to perform a plurality of quality, usability and integrity tests upon the item images. Given that truncation standards may allow for destruction of the paper item at the point of presentment, item images must be qualified at the point of presentment during capture of the transactions.
The need remains, therefore, for a system and method of processing a transaction at a point of presentment that improves quality control of transactions and images, in a real time mode, while reducing time and labor requirements at a point of presentment. The present invention fulfills this need.